GTFF unequivocally condemns the Trump administration’s brutal and illegal attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and his wife, Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores. This act of imperial aggression has already taken the lives of at least 80 people, and has put the lives of many more people in Venezuela and Latin America at risk of further destabilization and violence. As workers and scholars we find it imperative to place these recent events in a broader context of the history and political economy of the United States and Latin America and recognize that these developments are deeply intertwined with the escalating violence against immigrants within our own borders.
The abduction of Nicolás Maduro represents both a continuation of the long history of unilateral intervention by the United States and disregard for the national sovereignties of Latin America and also a troubling shift in our nation’s international relations. From the first days of the United States our leaders have dreamed of a hemispheric empire, and on occasion acted upon this impulse. After achieving independence, Alexander Hamilton mused about marching the Continental Army to Mexico and Peru1. In the decades after paying European rulers for the right to colonize lands in Florida and the North American interior, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams issued the Monroe Doctrine, establishing a basis for US adventurism in customary law. The manic pursuit of so-called “Manifest Destiny,” spearheaded by slaveholding capitalists in Texas and California led to further military seizures of land from Mexico and private filibustering missions to conquer further territory in Nicaragua and Honduras.2
Demand for the rubber, coal, tar, coffee, and oil that fueled the industrializing United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries motivated yet another wave of imperial violence, leading to the annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898 and the US Navy assisting in the removal of a Venezuelan President at the behest of American investors in 19083. The global war between the organized political forces of labor and capital that historians have termed the “long Cold War” began with the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and constituted yet another phase in the long story of US hemispheric dominance.
Under the aegis of making a world safe for democracy, overt and covert forces of the United States enforced gunboat diplomacy throughout the Carribean, overthrew the democratically elected leaders of Guatemala and Chile, violently contested revolutionaries in El Salvador, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and aided the right wing governments of Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil in committing genocide against their indigenous populations and disappearing trade union leaders4. Even as the ideological polarization that defined the Cold War lost its relevance in the United States, our presidents have utilized anticorruption rhetoric and the war on drugs as pretense to depose Panamanian president Manuel Noriega in 1990 and to assist in coups d’état in Haiti in 2004 and Honduras in 2009.
The events of January 3 are part of this long history, this must be acknowledged in order to understand how we got here. However, historicising the present does not make the Trump administration’s actions any less concerning. Historian Greg Grandin, among the most knowledgeable people in the world with regard to Latin American history, has warned that the actions of the Trump administration are “unraveling international law and perhaps setting the stage for a greater conflagration to come.”5 This fact above all else is of grave concern. Trump’s naked imperialism differs from previous modes of US adventurism abroad in its unilaterality. Trump has dispensed with even the pretense of international law or the higher motives that once cloaked these sorts of actions in favor of a chaotic and deeply personal imperialism. Already in the week since the January 3 attack on Caracas Trump has threatened to use similar tactics in Iran, Mexico, Cuba, and Greenland. It is difficult to overstate how disruptive this development is to peace and stability in the world.
GTFF is an anti-imperialist union. We know that imperialism abroad leaves the working class at home more impoverished and more desperate, as money is turned away from social services and infrastructure and funneled into increased military spending. In 2024, the US spent more on its military than the next nine countries combined6. Every missile could have bought food for the starving. Every fighter jet could have built a hospital for the sick. Imperialism only serves the interests of elites who grow rich off of weapons contracts and new resources to exploit opened up by imperial conquest.
As a higher-education labor union, we also want to make clear that the problems of increasing imperialism and decreasing funding for higher education are more closely related than they may appear. The decline in higher education funding is part of a larger, decades-long shift in which elites have increasingly asserted their class power over working people. This shift has led to billionaires and corporations paying almost no taxes, which in turn causes state and federal governments to cut funding for higher education due to a lack of revenue. Massive military spending to fund imperial conquest abroad only exacerbates this already perilous funding situation. Endeavors such as universal healthcare, affordable housing, and free higher-education would only require a small fraction of this country’s $892.6 billion military budget.7 Furthermore, as a labor union that is proud to have a large international student membership, many of our members come from countries that have been ravaged by US imperialist conquest. For many of them, US imperialism is not just a phrase in an academic paper but a lived reality.
We also acknowledge that the actions of this administration toward perceived enemies abroad are deeply entwined with their repression of perceived enemies within our own borders. In the months leading up to the removal of President Maduro, the Trump administration has fabricated claims of a vast network of Venezuelan gang members. Based on very little evidence, they have used the specter of a gang called “Tren de Aragua” to justify the kidnapping and deportation of Venezuelan nationals, most notably in the deportation of Sheet Metal Workers International member Kilmar Abrego Garcia and in the September 30 raid on a Chicago apartment building by 300 federal agents flown in on military helicopters in the middle of the night.8
More recently, ICE murdered Renee Good, an unarmed protestor in Minneapolis. And right here in Oregon, US Border Patrol shot two people in Portland while trying to arrest one of them under the suspicion that he was a member of Tren de Aragua. GTFF is deeply grieved and concerned by these horrific atrocities. We believe that the recent dramatic escalation in violence perpetrated by ICE is a prime example of what Aime Cesaire and Hannah Arendt called the imperial boomerang—the process by which tactics honed through use on foreign subject populations are turned inward on the imperial core to maintain control.9 Although the Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela may seem far away, the recent actions of ICE remind us that imperial violence is terribly near. The struggles of the American working class and the people of Venezuela are not separate or merely coinciding—they are one collective struggle against the imperial capitalist system.
GTFF is committed to doing everything we can to protect our membership from ICE. We are carefully monitoring the presence of ICE in Eugene, organizing anti-ICE protests, and working to locate funding support for legal fees that international students may accrue if they are detained. The extraordinary crises of our present moment should serve as a reminder of the importance of radical labor unionism. These crises can only be resolved by the collective action of working people.
We stand in solidarity with the people of Venezuela, our Latin American members, and all the working people of the world.
- “Alexander Hamilton to Harrison Gray Otis, 26 January 1799,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-22-02-0257 ↩︎
- Michael Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule, (Duke University Press, 2005) ↩︎
- Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, (1971). ↩︎
- Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, (Public Affairs, 2020); Gilbert M. Joseph and Greg Grandin, eds. A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence in Latin America’s Long Cold War, (Duke University Press, 2010); Steven Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile on the Eve of London 1998, (Duke University Press, 2004). ↩︎
- Greg Grandin, “Tar Wars,” The Nation, (6 January 2026), https://www.thenation.com/article/world/venezuela-tar-wars/# ↩︎
- “The United States Spends More on Defense than the Next 9 Countries Combined,” Peterson Foundation, https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-9-countries-combined/. ↩︎
- John Nichols, The GOP’s Bloated Pentagon Budget Is Indefensible, September 12, 2025, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/ndaa-pentagon-spending-gop/. ↩︎
- Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella and Mariam Elba, ““I Lost Everything”: Venezuelans Were Rounded Up in a Dramatic Midnight Raid but Never Charged With a Crime,” Pro Publica, (November 14, 2025). ↩︎
- Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, (1950); Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, (1951). ↩︎